As Someone Who Has Watched A Few Arthurian Adaptations, I Was Immediately Intrigued By „Gwen & Art

Happy October 3rd

New Ninjago au idea :)

A „10 things I hate about you“ Au with the Smith siblings, but less angsty cuz wdym u paid a guy to get with ur sister 🤨

Nya would not do that and also there is not a universe where the ninja aren’t friends imo

Plot Basics: nya wants to date jay >jay also wants taht > ray and maya are a bit hesitant about that > the sibling clause is coined so Kai has to date someone in order for nya to date > nya and jay think about it and start playing matchmaker with Kai and cole > cole could already have a crush it noz and jay maybe just convinced him taht it’s a good idea idk or he’s calling in a favour > the movie plot more or less happens > everyone is happy and we have two couples

Ofc it can be jsut like the movie but I like when AUs take the inspiration and also the source material anf make a new brain child out of it cuz the characters are not the same which influences the choices they make etc.

But yeah I’m leaving this here and letting it sun :)

Shoutout to @emiko-talks83 <3

Gedanken meinerseits zu die drei ???

Falls die drei sich je fürs College oder so trennen müssten, gibt es zwei Optionen:

1. sehr dramatische Situation, viele Tränen, viel Depression, viel alles, sie gehen zu dritt zur Therapie für mehrere Termine, löst sich freundlich und einigermaßen gut

2. auch Drama, Streit, Schuldgefühle, schlechte Kommunikation und die ganzen schlechten Seiten von deren basically co-dependency, reden vllt für eine längere Zeit nicht

In beiden fällen gibt es deren weirde co-dependence aber in einem Fall klären sie dies bevor es zum brechpunkt wird (weil co-dependency nicht healthy ist auf langzeit)

Am realistischsten ist es aber sowieso dass die ne WG machen und zumindest in der gleichen Stadt College/Arbeit haben (finde ich zumindest). Aber auch da müssen sie natürlich irgendwann ihre Probleme ansprechen 🤷🏻

Noch ein Gedanke

Habe die Rewe Edition Die drei ??? Bücher gelesen, welche jetzt nicht super charakterisieren aber

Man hätte zum Treffen zwischen Peter und Jeffrey auch Verabredung oder halt Treffen sagen können aber es wurde explizit das Wort Date genutzt

Ich spreche nur das aus was auf den Seiten steht (don’t boo me, im right)

Weiß aber auch nicht wie Canon diese Bücher sind . But still they exist with very queer undertones✋🏻

Und auch zu den Editionen: ich liebe Ellen, sie taucht zwar nur kurz auf aber sie ist so relatable . Sehr viel Liebe an Ellen und an Mandy die drei Sätze hatte und im Customer Service arbeitet, es ist nicht einfach🫶

Das war’s für heute

Disclaimer: Ich weiß nicht doll viel und bin müde also falls was nicht stimmt… der Mülleimer steht neben der Tür (/j)

It’s also basically all @emiko-fan-2podcasterin fault so… :)

So i thought about how I should get this started for a potential fanfic and a important thought process ofc was: who should I ask first… so I talked about it like a normal person with my friend @emiko-fan-2podcasterin

Me: yknow I think I should ask other druids before I let Radagast the Brown sign

Friend: oh interesting why?

Me: well based on what we saw the other Druid’s seem to not hold him up in high regards and think him crazy. And while I don’t agree we do needs a many signatures as possible

Friend: seems logical. But who will u ask first?

Me: I thought the elves

Friend: are u sure? I don’t think u will get any dwarven signatures that way…

Me: ur right that’s a problem

Me: I know! I’ll take a thick double sided paper for the signatures, so when the one side is full with elven signatures I’ll turn it around and the dwarfes will never know that I asked the elves first!

Friend(in a slightly sarcastic voice): yeah sure do that

So to conclude: I’m very proud of my thinking and my friend is supportive though very done with me :)

So me and my friend are watching the lord of the rings at the moment and I obviously had to ask them the obligatory question:

Me: So what would you do first if you could go to middle earth?

They: I would obviously be the first person to start a animal safety program

Me: …what

They: Yeah just look at those poor horses

Me: Yeah ok but-

They: And those poor poor elephants. They probably don’t even want to be there

Me: Ok I see your point…

a very self-indulgent idea i got after watching the last ep of fmab anime or “and there were two beds but they ignored it”

I’m watching pride and prejudice for the first time and as I saw Mr. Darcy I felt as if I had seen him before. After long watching and careful consideration, I had a sudden thought and I knew where I had seen such an unpleased frown mixed with such challenged emotions before : Miles Edgeworth, prosecutor of the Ace Attorney franchise.

It fits so perfect. In Phoenix we find the strong willed and free spirited protagonist that is Elizabeth Bennet. Thus I must insist on a Pride and Prejudice AU of Ace Attorney.

As such it all begins with Pride and Prejudice, doesn’t it?

hey after kristoph gavin planted atroquinine in a kid's favorite nailpolish, while he was spending seven long agonizing years waiting for the kid to actually poison herself, how badly do you think he pissed his dumb little blue pants when 6 years in his brother presumably out of nowhere published a song titled "atroquinine my love" and made the whole world sing it for a little while

Bernard Dowd and the Art of Recontextualization

I'm what you might call a "fake Batman fan" - that is, I've only watched most of the Batman animated series', all of the live action movies, most of the animated ones, played some of the video games... so, you know, probably thousands of hours of my life in Batman related media. But not the comics! Fake fan!

Frankly, I find the comics medium the way DC and Marvel do it to be really hard to follow. There's the fact that you can't really follow an individual solo character without them getting caught up in massive crossover events that ruin their arc and pacing, there's the soap-opera-iness that encourages cheap and revolving conflicts inherent to the longform monthly release schedule, the writer roulette, and there's also just that going back to try and thread a particular continuity or character is an exercise in frustration. Oh and the retcons. Everyone hates those. They've (basically) never been good. Don't remember this part it will never come up aga

But, you know, despite this - or maybe because of this - comics is a breeding ground for ideas. Because of the quick turnaround and the demand for novel conflicts, comics just churn out idea after idea. Good ideas, bad ideas, doesn't matter. Get it to print. Retcon it later if we write ourselves into a corner. Comics are often soooooo first draft coded. This is why I personally prefer adaptations - they often reimagine ideas and retcon them into new narratives where they can serve a more coherent plot. But what happens when a character is picked up for a second draft ... without actually contradicting the earlier material? While enriching the earlier material, even?

(SPOILERS for Tim Drake: Robin and uh... 20 year old comics under the cut!)

So, uh, quick disclaimer - because I have very little overall knowledge of DC's Comics continuity, there may be more interesting examples of times that what I'm going to point out was done. But I love Bernard and from a writer's POV I'm impressed with the way they did it so we're talking about Bernard lmao

The Beginning (Robin 1993) - Reading comics from the 2000s hurts in a way I can't describe

Okay so I heard Tim Drake is dating a guy now? (Penny Sonic voice) Whoa he's bisexual I didn't know that! I'm sure people on the internet are being very normal about this. Cool let's find out more about his new bf. I like starting from the beginning... so like yeah hold on while I crack open the Robin comic and take down what this guy's deal is.

😬

So basically the TL;DR of Bernard in his original appearances is that he seems to be an attempt to introduce some normal stakes teen drama into Tim's life. He has all the Funny Guy Friend Classics - he's got an inflated sense of his proficiency at pulling girls, he's inexplicably drawn towards the protagonist (who is cooler than him), he wants to date the most popular girl in school, and he wants to get down with older women!

This might just be me but while I was going through this I thought like, he almost reads a little uncanny, like he's been filtered through a Disney Teen Special. In practice he mostly serves to introduce Tim to the Real Plot, Darla Aquista, and be one of his ties to civilian life, which is, like, fine. He's ultimately just a background character and he's so unimportant that he only has one appearance after their school gets shot up(!!!), which is, again, to be more of an accessory to the Darla plot.

After this display of "wow this guy's kind of lowkey insane for offering to his resurrected bestie supervillainess to be her manager actually", he's dropped forever. Comics! We're not gonna unpack that.

The Sequel (Batman: Urban Legends) - We're Gonna Unpack That

Until almost two decades later when he calls Tim up for a date. And while I'm trying to skim over a lot to get to the point here and I don't really know the FULL context, it is notable that Tim is in the middle of an identity crisis / the cusp of adulthood when this happens (I think he just lost a spleen or something. That sucks dude). It's pretty implicit that part of the reason he's going to see Bernard is because he's someone familiar in a time when he's facing a lot of new and scary stuff.

And at first blush, he really does seem like the same dude. The familiar arm over the shoulder, the banter, it's all very casual and similar to the ribbing from high school -

- and I guess nothing has happened to Bernard in the interim haha he's just the funny friend guy right?

I really like the way they did this. I'm just unambiguously going to praise how good this is if you just came off the 2000s stuff. Comics have kind of breakneck pacing by nature but they really manage to condense down and then pull off a neat sleight of hand over the course of like four pages here. They re-establish Bernard as a silly guy and then wham you with the fact that yeah actually we ARE gonna unpack that. Fuck you Tim Drake life is ever changing and nothing stays the same

So the TL;DR on the rest of the Urban Legends storyline is that stuff like, HAPPENED to this guy while our focus was elsewhere. He learned martial arts, presumably so that he wouldn't be so helpless in the next school shooting level event, he got into a pain cult, he's just Not Doing Well. We find out, reading between the lines, that calling Tim on a date was probably one of his last attempts to reach out to someone when the cult stuff was getting really bad.

I've heard people complain that Bernard is uninteresting or not a character or entirely focused on his relationship with Tim, and I think that criticism is really weird considering that his entire re-debut focuses on the point that he's been having his own life and making his own (often wild) decisions - ones that really changed the course of his life - while Tim was gone. And it's also notable that this story is about how the fact that he's his own person and has changed and has made the nerve-wracking decision to take action and call Tim inspires Tim himself to take a leap and fling himself into the uncertain waters of young adulthood.

Me when I have my bi awakening and call to get out of a rut simultaneously because Cute Insane Guy Inspired Me. iconic

So that's how Bernard has changed. But that's not recontextualization, that's just the writers taking a guy and making him do another, cooler thing. Well hold the fuck on because we're not goddamn done.

What did he mean by th-

The Recontextualizerrrrr (Tim Drake: Robin) - Bernard is the funniest person in Gotham City. I'll not be taking constructive criticism on this

Tim Drake: Robin is the followup to the Urban Legends story and Tim is the main character fr. Obviously. but Bernard is also a major character. Later, he even gets to be a POV character. But they don't do that for several issues, instead treating us to his shenanigans from Tim's point of view as he solves a bizarre serial murder case and like, they're cute! And neither of them are normal in the slightest. I love that for them.

Again, TL;DR, there are a lot of interactions where Bernard talks to Tim both in and out of costume, but we don't get to see his POV until they go out to a restaurant and meet Bernard's parents there by accident and Tim has to run off to do Robin stuff. And like... a lot of stuff happens in this one bois. Whammy after whammy

We're suddenly introduced explicitly to a lot that was only implied or just completely unavailable before. Bernard's parents are ragingly homophobic. Probably were never great even before that. He suffers from depression. All that is a lot to. wait. hold on a second

he knows?????

HE KNOWS????

Okay so if you stop at this point and reread the entire run so far you find out that Bernard is in fact the biggest troll in the entire universe. This is the moment that cemented him as my favourite, by the way. Like I had a feeling that he knew and I was just laughing my ass off when my suspicions were confirmed.

But this is really interesting on top of that because Bernard has been revealed to be, at this point, a guy who you should look deeper than the surface to understand. Someone who masks his true self and whose true motivations you can only uncover if you're really looking past the facade. Even with Tim, he sort of offers Tim and Robin half the story each, taking advantage of Robin's "distance" to give out information he wants Tim to think about but that he's reluctant to talk about frankly while at the same time almost daring Tim to open up about his identity.

Absolutely most normal way to tell your bf about your cult trauma. You'll always be famous to me Bernard Dowd

This is a really neat trick by the writers. It makes Bernard a multifaceted character who got to quietly develop while we were mostly focused on Tim, and there's some clever clever foreshadowing they set up in this run to achieve this. If it were just this, I would call it good writing.

But it actually goes one level deeper than that and becomes something really really special. because as we all know, Bernard was not conceived to be this way, he was a one-off guy who was kind of annoying and he was essentially retconned to be, like. Gay? Have depth? Be funny? All of those things?

The Seamless Retcon (Robin 1993 Again) - We took your guy and we gave him gay subtext and it worked astoundingly well

This is not a new observation btw, I've seen a ton of posts to this effect. But oh my god. Some of these panels really hit different with the new Bernard lore. Like holy fuck just read this back to back

There are tons of moments like this. There's SO MUCH that the revelation that Bernard is queer adds to his initially extremely underwhelming tenure in the Robin comics. A reread almost begs the question of what Bernard must have been thinking at any given moment! BRO YOU SAID YOU WANTED TO FUCK HIS STEPMOM. That's completely believable as a next-level closeting move and goes from kind of annoying to turbofunny.

Like yeah of course he's acting like a douche. His father is a status-chasing asshole and he's five racks deep in the closet. Of course he gravitates towards Tim - his gaydar is pinging and he thinks Tim is cute. And it's also pinging that Tim is like. You know

None of this would hit as hard if the writers had not set up Bernard as someone who masks so much. They worked it in that character trait to mean that you could always glean information deeper than the surface from his top level interactions.

Because of this, Bernard is really fucking interesting and he's a good character and he's one that gets better on reread. Like I said, that's a set of observations that are not new to me. But something that really gets to me is how seamless and intentional it is. It really feels like the writer sat down and took their time devising a guy that is believable as that other guy, but only if you read back with certain context.

The conclusion - Comics. Man.

So is this just about how Bernard is really fucking interesting and he's a good character and he's one that gets better on reread and that he can exist independent of Tim and all the haters are wrong. Yeah of course. 💖

But also like, I have thoroughly proven to myself that I was kinda wrong to just reject the published comics medium out of hand. I see now that there's room for the writer's roulette to hit the jackpot and that something I mistook as an outright flaw, the winding and unfocused and often improvised nature of it, can be ridden like a wave if you're skilled enough to do it. Meghan Fitzmarten is a goddamned genius.

I guess I have to read comics now. Fuck

can i just say that the friendship between shawn spencer & burton guster means absolutely everything to me. these characters are genuinely just the bestest of friends. theyre pals. buddies even. they are everything that i aspire to be and have. they have their ups and downs but like seriously they are awesome for each other and its so refreshing to see.